I accepted an offer on my home now what

“By the hundreds of thousands they had come, from all over Georgia , all over the South, all over America , all over the world into those subdivided hills and downs and glens and glades of trees…and they were still pouring in.”…Tom Wolfe, A Man In Full
You know Vanessa, I remember checking out Zillow after it launched and being totally awed by the site. With your “Zestimates”, I could easily track the rising value of my home and keep up with the sales comparables in my neighborhood. I can even tell you that one time, after my bank gave me a low-ball appraisal when I went to them for an increase in my home line of credit, I actually sent my branch manager to Zillow to show proof of my home´s value, and that (along with a WTF phone call to upper-level bank management) enabled me to lock in a credit line much higher than originally offered.
As I see it, Zillow has some formidable competition. Cyberhomes has no pretense of community but has a … [Read more...] about Hey Vanessa: My Thoughts About Zillow

The owners of Botto Italian Pizza Bistro are a little…straightforward. Look no further than their FAQ page, which is either a brilliant marketing prank or a very deliberate warning to would-be customers: “Do you have ice? No. Why? Because that’s the way, uh huh uh huh, we like it.” It’s this level of anti-service that defines Botto, which could potentially become a thorn in the side of Yelp. Botto’s Rebuttal Botto is waging a campaign to become the worst-reviewed restaurant on Yelp, which they say is a way to get back at the review aggregator. The managers of Botto, David Cerretini and Michele Massimo, believe Yelp has virtually no bearing over the success of their restaurant. To prove their point, they are offering 25% discount to customers who leave negative reviews. On their home page, and in interviews, the two repeatedly say Yelp doesn’t exist in Italy. They even go so far as to say people who take Yelp too seriously should turn the … [Read more...] about Restaurant Offering Discount for Negative Yelp Reviews

When information started to be plentiful online, some of us rushed to store it on floppies, CDs, memory sticks, and—more recently—cloud systems. We did this, at least at first, because we were afraid it wouldn’t last. Not only were we wrong, but the quantity of information has increased dramatically over the last few years. It’s impressive, looking back, how all the boundaries vanished—both the ones between readers and writers, and the ones between experts and copycats. According to a Vcloudnews infographic, the numbers are dramatic:
2,500,000,000,000,000,000 (2.5 quintillion) bytes of data are created daily 90% of all the data in the world was created in the last two years 4.6 billion pieces of content are produced daily
We’ve reached the point where people won’t even consider accepting meaningful, specific information unless we are careful with how it is delivered. There’s an exception when it comes to mindless entertainment online, … [Read more...] about Why Audiences Only Accept Remarkable Content

It’s a bad privacy day for Google, with Privacy International first accusing the company of having the worst privacy performance of any internet service company in a study it has just released and then accusing Google of conducting a smear campaign against it. But if you actually read the report, Privacy International itself comes off bad for putting out a haphazard condemnation of Google. Let’s do the smear campaign accusation first. An Open Letter to Google from the group says that Google is talking to journalists and implying that Privacy International favors Microsoft: Two European journalists have independently told us that Google representatives have contacted them with the claim that “Privacy International has a conflict of interest regarding Microsoft”. I presume this was motivated because Microsoft scored an overall better result than Google in the rankings…. According to our sources, your representative or representatives made particular … [Read more...] about Google Bad On Privacy? Maybe It’s Privacy International’s Report That Sucks

PageRank. If you do SEO or are involved with Google or search, you’ll come across this topic at some point. You’ll also likely be confused by what exactly PageRank means. To solve that, here’s a guide to PageRank, designed for searchers and site owners alike. Google’s Definition: PageRank As Votes Let’s start with what Google says. In a nutshell, it considers links to be like votes. In addition, it considers that some votes are more important than others. PageRank is Google’s system of counting link votes and determining which pages are most important based on them. These scores are then used along with many other things to determine if a page will rank well in a search. Don’t like me speaking for Google? No worries. When Google talks about PageRank at its site, it often links to the Google Technology The heart of our software is PageRank™, a system for ranking web pages developed by our founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford … [Read more...] about What Is Google PageRank? A Guide For Searchers & Webmasters